Instruments User Guide

About Instruments

Instruments is a performance-analysis and testing tool for dynamically tracing and profiling OS X and iOS code. It is a flexible and powerful tool that lets you track a process, collect data, and examine the collected data. In this way, Instruments helps you understand the behavior of both user apps and the operating system.

At a Glance

With Instruments, you use special tools (known as instruments) to trace different aspects of a process’s behavior. You can also use the tool to record a sequence of user interface actions in OS X and replay them over and over again to replicate a set of steps, while using one or more instruments to gather data.

Instruments provides the ability to:

Examine the behavior of one or more processes

Record a sequence of OS X user actions and replay them, reliably reproducing those events and collecting data over multiple runs

Profile apps in OS X and in iOS (in iPhone or iPad Simulator, or on a physical iOS device)

Create your own custom DTrace instruments to analyze aspects of system and app behavior

See Also

Instruments is best used in conjunction with Xcode. For information on how to use Xcode, see Xcode Overview. For a complete list of help articles for performing essential Instruments tasks, see Instruments Help.